


Sleep

by worldturtling



Series: Lost in Fairyland [2]
Category: The Good Place (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fae, Dragon Michael (The Good Place), F/M, Fairy Tale Retellings, Fractured Fairy Tale, Hurt/Comfort, Possessive Behavior, Protective Michael
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-15
Updated: 2018-05-15
Packaged: 2019-05-07 14:32:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,280
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14673102
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/worldturtling/pseuds/worldturtling
Summary: The claustrophobia of a second. The longest escapist nap ever. Don't steal a dragon's princess girlfriend, it won't end well for anyone.Or, Eleanor and Michael do the concept of Sleeping Beauty





	Sleep

_Tap. Tap. Tap._

The knocks on the door are polite, but insistent.

 _“_ Shitshitshit _”_ , Eleanor echoes back, under her breath.

Nobody ever told you about this. Hooray, you’re a princess, the end. Happily ever after. That’s it.

No one ever says anything about the build up, about the castle out of nowhere and the servants that never look at you and the dresses. And the marriage part.

The marriage.

Nobody ever tells you the way princesses get to the tallest tower in the highest room because they simply _ran out of steps to run on._

And for some reason, none of the steps Eleanor took in this bastard castle seemed to lead outwards. She wasn’t thinking about that right now.

When she was a girl, in a forest, being raised by her three not-mom -not aunts -kind of weird old ladies in their little cottage, none of this was ever told to her. She was raised like a normal kid, or a kid normal as could be when raised in a forest right outside of town and left to her own devices. She made her own games. And, when curiosity persisted, ventured into town and tried to blend in as a local and Not as the weird kid raised by the weird old ladies in the weird hut in the middle of the woods.

No, she was told that she was a long lost heir when she was the ripe age of 18ish to somewhere between 23 and 25, (time was behaving in a weird fashion she was just beginning to grasp right now, in the tallest room of the tallest tower, looking at the view of an ever expanding and distant forest, and currently it was _not_ working in her favor), and that she was engaged to a prince who was coming to get her.

Maybe the last part of that, the phrasing, maybe it hadn’t sounded so ominous.

But then again, in her memory, in the way that she felt, she knew it had been.

_Tap.Tap.Tap._

The knocks bring her back to the present.

She was in her wedding dress already. She has no idea how that happened. Three crazy old ladies who lived in a hut did it somehow. 

She looks at the narrow window opening. She looks around the rest of the dusty, circular room.

There was nothing else here with her, save for a large wooden spindle thing with crazy spider web action going on.

_Taptaptap._

She thinks she hears the door start to budge in a way like wood growing makes sound. She doesn’t know what a tree growing sounds like, but she isn’t focusing on that detail right now.

When she was really little, she had found a chiclet. She raised it, and let it follow her around, and the three old women had let her. They were permissive about everything, silent as the grave but smiling she thinks, if she tries to remember, maybe.

Until one day she had a beautiful full grown chicken, that one of the women then took from her, and snapped its neck. They ate it for dinner. (She thinks they did, it may have just been her.The memory business is wonky right now.)

Eleanor was beginning to realize she was the chicken. She was about to be devoured.   

 _Spindles_. Her mind circles back around to the information she had at hand.The only reason she knew about the stupid things is because her weird not aunts not moms old ladies had played cards with her once, showed her this drawing, and said no touch. She was a baby, she was a kid, she was 11 years old and they would show her these images over and over with a _no touch_.

It’s like everything in Eleanor’s life had led her to this systematically designed moment, this blinking neon Do Not Touch self-destruct button. Why? It was just wood. She looks at it. She can see a spider chilling on the axle, and she wishes they could trade places.

 _Creek_.

The door is opening.

She brings her palm down so hard on the spindle she feels it break skin.

Then she feels nothing.

-

Her lungs burn. She’s coughing herself out of a hazy dream. She doesn’t remember too much of it. Her throat feels dry. She’s hungry.

“Whoops, careful there, need some water?” A bottle is shoved at her. She grabs for it and gulps it down. Then she remembers what brought her here. She takes a deep breath as soon as she puts the bottle down.

“Idon’twannagetmarried!” She says in one breath, through a hoarse throat. 

She’s greeted with silence.

She looks up. A man with white hair and a suit is looking at her with pitched eyebrows. She looks around. She looks up. She looks to the side, where a man’s body lay.

“My name is Michael,” Michael says, “and he’s not dead.” He sits at the edge of her canopy bed. “Sorry, I’m a bit winded, it took a lot of stairs to follow that guy.”

“Who is he?” Eleanor asks, evaluating several things, raising herself up on her elbows to look around. She’s also taking in all the dead leaves on the floor. The spindle is nowhere to be found. “Why were you following him?”

Michael looks at her with studious eyes. She gets the feeling he spends a lot of time around books.

“You’ve been asleep for a hundred years,” He tells her point blank. She blinks. She looks to the side.

“Everyone else…?”

“Still asleep.”

“Cool.” She nods to emphasize this. She nods to the dude lying in the floor. “So who’s he?”

“The prince sent to mate you,” Michael says with a grimace. Eleanor mirrors it. “Ew what? After all this time?”

Michael looks around the room, and then back at the bed, and looks at the coverlet. A shadow passes over his face. It had velvet red flowers on it.

“The brambles were a problem for everyone for a while. Also, I think this was intended to be the marriage bed.”

Eleanor hops out like she’s been burned. Her legs stumble. A hundred years of disuse, and her body needs to remember how to move. Michael stands and catches her quickly, his arm securing her around the waist, and his other hand enclosing over her arm.

“Are you alright?” He looks her over, like he’s looking for visible wounds.

“How did I end up here?” She asks, gripping the sleeves of his jacket, but overall remembering the feeling of wrongness settling into her stomach. Of course she isn’t alright. She’ll deal with that part later. She looks up into his eyes, and has to keep looking up to find them. He’s regarding her with a calculating look. He doesn’t let her go. She gets the feeling he’s forgotten to. She wishes her legs would remember to work.

‘Your parents promised you to a rumplesomething when you were a child. You’ve been raised by the fairies ever since.”  Vague memories surface somewhere between the haze of ones currently there that didn’t look right.  Enough to tell her this isn’t false. Enough to be washed over with the disappointing feeling of wishing she could be surprised.

“Why did the spindle thing work?”

She can see Michael’s eyes flicker around the room, take in details, and put certain things together she thinks she grasps.

“Stipulation before they took you. You must have had a witch looking out for you.” The last one is said in a lower voice. More to himself. She gets the feeling he’s on his own a lot. “And they probably never thought you’d have the gall to do it,” this one is said to the room at large and less to Eleanor, but he’s got a hint of a smile. It almost sounds like he’s in on a joke.

Huh.

He returns his gaze back down to her, and frowns.

“Can you stand? I woke you up with an ammonia mixture, but the act of you waking will trigger the rest of the kingdom. We should get going soon.”

Eleanor tries, and fails, to stand on wobbly legs. They both see this. He adjusts his glasses while looking down at her and assesses.

“Just…give me a minute.” She says, holding a splayed hand to his chest. Which is above her head. Had a race of giants intermingled with the populace in the last hundred years?

“Try not to move,” he warns, before bending down to scoop an arm behind her knees and another supporting her waist.

She clamps an arm around his neck.

“Dude!” her voice cracks as she’s lifted to an altitude she’s not used to normally existing in. But he does move fast. Corridors pass them faster than should be possible. She could make money off this kind of ride, a fly away thought says. Kids would go bonkers. She’s just getting more nauseous though, as the halls filled with her sleeping jailors pass them by over and over. A skull here and there looks at her eyelessly, covered in unfamiliar knight armor. She balks. 

“You really did have to pick the highest room in the tallest tower,” He huffs under his breath after the thirtieth flight of stairs. She thinks they’re almost at the ground level.

“You’re pretty strong for an old man,” she tells him conversationally.

“Not a man,” he says offhandedly, but she sees the nervous flicker of his eyes to hers.

“Then what are you…” Her only ride out right now, she answers herself, but looks around in case she needs to make off on her own. Somehow. Maybe with some rolling.

“A dragon. An anthropologist. An academic. _Not one of them don’t move_ ,” He ducks them under some very sharp looking spikes that appear from absolutely nowhere. Booby trapped castle?

Eleanor looks at his facial features, all very close for her observation at the moment. They’re sharp, dignified, kind, maybe a little too sharp though to trust that former part. Angled in a way to look almost attractive.

“I can dig that.” She decides, and smiles at Michael’s amused huff. “Why did you take that prince guy out?”

“He was trying to kiss you.” The thought of that sends a cold shiver up Eleanor’s very being.

“Oh. Was that supposed to wake me up?”

“Probably.”

“What would that have done?”

Michael gets on a landing. His strides take him farther than the stairs did. It takes them past some sleeping guards. She can see the tick in his frown.

“Made you his.”

“I see.”

Going through the brambly thorny forest is another experience altogether. Michael is hunched over her, somehow protecting more of her than there is of him. But she can see the thorns ripping at his jacket, and scratching at his cheek.

When they finally make it out, she gasps. The inside of the forest, it had been sunny, mildly warm, and balmy.

On the other side, here, it was the dead of winter. Snow was thick and white on the ground. She gasped from the shock of the cold to her toes, to her nose, to the way the wind stole her breath.

He carries her over a few feet, and she can make out the outline of a carriage, and as they get closer, the shadows of a very large, coal black species of horse.

She’s fumbling on a million questions. But she only really needs to know one right now.

 “Why did you come for me?”

He places her down on the ground before the coach carefully. Her feet touch ice, but around him everything is somehow warm to the touch. He lets her regain her balance, but she still ends up gripping his lapels for support. He stills for her.

He looks at her through his glasses, which she’s beginning to think are just for show; a people disguise to make other people feel better when those eyes look at them. They’re hard to get away from.

She feels hot. She feels naked. She wants to tear off the dress that isn’t hers. When he speaks, his voice sounds like fire in her mind.

“Because they took what’s mine. And I don’t forget.” She notices his skin feels hot underneath his jacket. She feels cold in comparison.

His hands come to frame her waist before she can respond, and effortlessly lifts her into his carriage, following her up. He strips his jacket off and hands it to her wordlessly. He watches her put it on, and she gets the distinct feeling of a wolf watching a sheep slip into its den.

“What’d they take of yours?”

Michael keeps eye contact with her as he stands.

“Isn’t it obvious, Eleanor?” He says with a smile. 

She has the distinct clarity of mind to remember never having given her name.

 He climbs over the back to take the leather straps guiding the horses in his hands. His jacket contains all the heat of a live furnace around her.

As he snaps the reins, memories flash before her. Moments, small and quick, a promise to a god, a child’s blood pact to the sky, a book she shouldn’t have but given to her anyway by a strange woman accommodating her request for more knowledge. The fantasy of growing wings and flying  away feeling too real. The current reality of gods and monsters.

The snow and wind around them growls louder, and the sound of the horses’ hooves beating on the ground are deafening drums to her ears, but when he speaks, she hears it as if his mouth were directly in her ear.

“They took you.”


End file.
